The Beast's Pen

Grav is Ray Gravell, Welsh international and British Lion Rugby player of the 70s and 80s. Owen Thomas’ play is a 75 minute monologue taking us through his life, from childhood in a tiny Welsh village to celebrity status in later years, including appearing in a film alongside Peter OToole. The story dwells long on one match that ended Llanelli 9, New Zealand 3, underlining its main theme – the triumph of a humble man on a world stage. Gareth Bale (no, not the footballer) plays Grav as a starstruck lad from the valleys, bemused to be in the company of Gareth Edwards, JPR Williams and the like and relating a string of very amusing anecdotes.

Performance date: 17 August 2015

A sobering monologue, Andy Duffy’s play tells of a risk-taking stock market trader (Jamie Michie) whose personal life is a train wreck to match the financial crash of 2008. Michie describes both aspects of the character’s life with equal emotional detachment, making an interesting point, but, in so doing, he leaves the whole piece feeling dull and rambling. A disappointment.

Performance date: 16 August 2015

Gary McNair’s Donald Robertson is not a Stand-up Comedian was my favourite show at last year’s Edinburgh Fringe and here he is again at the same venue, this time with an affectionate tribute to his own grandfather, probably the only man in Glasgow to have placed a bet on England to win the World Cup in 1966. McNair proves again that he is a consummate storyteller with a beautifully constructed tale, full of irony, pathos and humour. The unmistakable squeaky voice of Donald takes us through McNair’s childhood fascination with his granddad’s eccentricity, leading to unconcealed admiration during the old man’s dying years. Maybe the sting in the tail is not quite as sharp as in last year’s show, but still this is another hour to treasure.

Performance date: 16 August 2015

Harry Houdini and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, working in very different fields, both possessed gifts for mystifying the public. Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky’s play shows how a friendship borne out of mutual admiration was formed between the two, only to flounder when Doyle’s stubborn advocacy of spiritualism clashed with Houdini’s staunch belief that everything must have a logical explanation. Alan Cox is the confident and unswerving illusionist and Phil Jupitus drifts in and out of a Scottish accent (risky for this venue) as the creator of Sherlock Holmes. The writers sow the seeds of a good idea that never really comes to fruition in a rather flat production falling well short of the wit and invention for which both of its protagonists were renowned.

Performance date: 16 August 2015

Theatre can be bewilderingly complex, but, every so often, something like this apparently simple little show can come along and blow you completely away. It undervalues the work of Bryony Kimmings and Tim Grayburn to call their piece simple, but it is a tribute to them to say that the sum total of their undoubted efforts is that they make it seem so – just a small studio space, a few funny hats and other props and two people talking to and about each other and themselves. Bryony, a performance artist and Tim, an advertising agency account manager, meet, begin a relationship and, six months later, Tim reveals that he suffers from severe clinical depression. There is not much funny about a condition that contributes to suicide having become the leading cause of death for men in the UK under 40, but a lightness of touch, embellished by the sweetest hints of romance, prevails throughout. Much is made of Grayburn’s lack of stage a technique, a conceit that grows thin as the show progresses, but everything else is a sincere, humorous and natural account of coming to terms with mental illness, talking about it, and sharing day-to-day problems such as managing medication. The show is a triumph, filled with warmth and positivity. Oh and Bryony is heavily pregnant, another reason to congratulate this talented pair..

Performance date: 16 August 2015

A young man, hurrying to visit his wife and new-born daughter in hospital escapes a strange encounter in the street, but is then transported into the future, finding himself in an old people’s home, still young but inside an old body. How quickly life passes and how long drawn out its ending is what it seems we are being shown. Vanishing Point’s production, conceived and directed by Matthew Lenton is a haunting visual and atmospheric account of senile dementia and the closing stages of life. Dialogue is perfunctory – everyday chit-chat, calming words from nurses to patients, necessarily repetitive and banal. There are elements of cruel beauty in a production that has bewitching qualities, but maybe its messages are not ones that not many of us are keen to take in.

Performance date: 15 August 2015

Annie Ryan’s adaptation of Eimear McBride’s novel tells the story of the first 20 years in the life of a Dublin girl, growing up with her dominant mother and older brother. The raw and harrowing narrative includes several shocking elements as the girl grows to accept being the victim of various forms of abuse and adds to her own torment. The character is brought vividly to life in an astonishing performance by Aoife Duffin. Describing events in a matter-of-fact way, she makes the lowering of the girl’s self esteem seem almost as horrific as the pain of what it is inflicted upon her and, standing alone on the large stage of Traverse 1, she paints an unforgettable picture of loneliness and despair.

Performance date: 15 August 2015

With flashing lights, the sounds of gunfire, explosions and shattering glass, the sanctuary of a presidential palace in some unspecified, freezing urban war zone is under threat. Four women await their fates: the President’s wife, Micheleine in her designer outfit and matching accessories; her “best friend” (the pair really hate each other), Genevieve, widow of an artist whose painting hangs in the Palace’s reception room; A photographer from another country, Kathryn, waiting to take a portrait of the absent President; and a translator, Gilma, a local girl and compulsive thief. Abi Morgan draws these characters vividly, with sharp and insightful dialogue and superb performances flesh them out, but then Morgan places them in a context that is frustratingly vague and enigmatic. Scenes are played and re-played, without being fully explained; characters talk to each other, to themselves, to the audience and through the translator/mistranslator and we are often unsure as to which. Sometimes Morgan’s structure is Pinteresque, but the interaction of the women is never less than intriguing. Director Robert Hastie packs the play with edginess and tension and Peter McKintosh’s cold and spacious art deco set is magnificent. Sinead Cusack’s bitchy and defiant Micheleine dominates most scenes, complemented by Michelle Fairley’s nervy and self-deluding Genevieve. Genevieve O’Reilly’s Kathryn is an icy outsider, here to observe and record, but not immune to emotional involvement.  Zawe Ashton’s Gilma is a mischievous upstart, surveying the palace’s splendour whilst eager to gain from the uprising on the streets outside. Perhaps the play suffers from Morgan being a little more clever than she needs to be; perhaps a more straightforward linear narrative could have helped it to arrive at a more satisfying conclusion. As things are, this is an engrossing 95 minutes that leaves behind it a niggling feeling that it should have been so much better.

Performance date: 14 August 2015

This review was originally written for The Public Reviews: http://www.thepublicreviews.

Noel Coward was so adept at slipping risqué messages under the radar of the Lord Chamberlain, that it becomes easy to overlook how “naughty” he may have been. From the perspective of his own unconventional (for his day) lifestyle, he became a wry observer of the couplings and uncouplings of the filthy rich in the interwar years. Neither of the two featherlight playlets presented here by Proud Haddock productions comes anywhere near Coward’s astute examinations of relationships in, say, Private Lives or Design for Living, but both give insights into the frivolous lives of people with too much money to bother about being sensible, the types who would always find time for infidelity between trips to look after their interests in the colonies. We Were Dancing (1935), originally part of the Tonight at 8.30 play cycle, takes place in a country club somewhere in the tropics. Hubert (John MacCormick) walks into the club bar to find his wife (Lianne Harvey) dancing with another man and reacts as if he is witnessing adultery. It turns out that he is not far wrong. James Sindall is a joy as the other man, blithe and remaining oblivious to the married couple’s agonising. Stiff upper-lipped Hubert can do no more than ask his wife’s prospective lover “would you care to come back to the house and have a bath?” A slow scene change sees the country club become, rather neatly, a four-poster bed for The Better Half, written in 1921, but not discovered until 2007. In this menage à trois with a twist, Tracey Pickup’s ferocious, self-absorbed Alice has become so bored with her gentlemanly husband (Stephen Fawkes) that she uses every means at her disposal to persuade him to leave her for a woman who adores him (Beth Eyre). Apposite songs, taken from other Coward shows, are added to the mix to provide pleasant interludes. Director Jimmy Walters does not overdo the pastiche, seemingly realising that the playlets are already self-mocking and that Coward’s matchless wit is enough to get the laughs. The two playlets run together for no more than 70 minutes and Coward showed masterful judgement in not trying to stretch out either of them. By modern standards, they do not seem particularly naughty, but they are still quite nice.

Performance date: 11 August 2015

At its best, Jerry Herman’s score for Mack and Mabel must rank alongside the greatest ever written for a Broadway musical and Jonathan Church’s revival reminds us that it never strays far from that best. The overtures to both acts, played here superbly by Robert Scott’s orchestra, send shivers down the spine, before Herman’s exquisite lyrics are heard or the sparkling dance routines are seen. So, the enigma of M & M is why it has never received all the fine things that it deserves either on Broadway or in the West End, where it may never have been seen at all were it not for Torvill & Dean’s unforgettable routine to its music. The theory that musical theatre audiences demand happy endings is not borne out by the success of many other shows and Michael Stewart’s book is certainly not sub-standard, or at least not in this version, revised by Francine Pascal. Maybe the story, a love affair based on real-life characters and set against the backdrop of the birth of Hollywood in the 1920s silent movie era, is trying to pack in too much. Maybe the relationship between the central characters is just too complex to convey successfully. For me, having now seen four different productions, a clue comes from the fact that my favourite remains the miniature version directed by Thom Southerland at the old Southwark Playhouse in 2012. The intimacy of the small venue may have diminished the spectacle of the big routines, but it brought the human story to the fore. Here, Chichester’s large thrust stage is perfect for the big song and dance numbers, but, when one or two characters are alone on it, they seem lost. In the end, it probably comes down to striking the right balance between the intimate and the spectacular and, maybe, no production, including this one, has yet quite managed to achieve that. Michael Ball, quite a bit older than Mack Sennett was in the 1920s captures the essence of the hard-nosed film director who is obsessed with making people laugh and is totally inept when it comes to wooing his leading lady, Mabel Normand; but then Herman makes it easy for him by summing up the character in a single song: “my pace is frantic my temper’s cross, with words romantic I’m at a loss…”. Ball may well have sung I Won’t Send Roses a thousand times over the years, but here he acts it and means it. Rebecca LaChance is beguiling as the naive small town waitress Mabel, but she is less assured when her character develops into the self-important, damaged movie star. It is somewhat disappointing, given the stage space available, that Church does not make more of the slapstick, particularly the Keystone Cops, and some of Stephen Mear’s choreography in the first half is just ordinary. However, Hundreds of Girls is buoyant and When Mabel Comes in the Room is staged with real panache. Near the end, in the middle of the show’s unfolding tragedy, comes Tap Your Troubles Away to do exactly what Hollywood movies have always done – cheer us up. This is the third time that I have seen Anna-Jane Casey take the lead on this glorious dance routine and, if she chooses to shape her career around it, is anyone going to complain? One serious gripe (and a surprise bearing in mind the number of years in which Church has worked at Chichester) is that almost all of the production is played directly to the front, apparently ignoring the fact that the audience here is seated in a crescent-shaped auditorium. Yes, the production will be going on tour to proscenium arch theatres, but, if that is the excuse, it is a pretty weak one. Otherwise, this is a polished and highly entertaining show that will do nothing to damage Chichester’s growing reputation for generating world-class productions of musicals. One day, someone will come up with the perfect Mack and Mabel, but, while we wait for it, at least we can wallow again in all those magnificent songs.

Performance date: 5 August 2015